Over the past week, Beirut has been rocked by violence yet again. On January 25, a Lebanese Internal Security Forces officer working with the UN investigation…
Browsing: Lebanon
(photo: Maamoun Homsi at Rafik Hariri Memorial, Beirut) Invitation for a sit-in and a hunger-strike By a group of Syrian Human Rights and Democracy Activists Where:…
Berlin Detlev Mehlis speaks slowly. So when he says, “I haven’t seen a word in his reports during the past two years confirming that he has…
For some years now, Arab diplomacy has been a chronicle of death foretold. In Iraq, Darfur, and the Palestinian territories, either Arab states have been too…
You have to wonder what Michel Aoun thought when he heard the sound of the bomb that went off next to a US Embassy SUV on…
(Just to put the historical record straight, the israeli point of view about what happened in Lebanon immediately before the Syrian withdrawal from the country might…
So unreliable have Syrian commitments to Lebanon’s normalization been in recent months, that almost no one anticipates success for the Arab League plan to resolve the…
Israel missed a reasonable opportunity for a cease-fire with Hezbollah during the first week of the Second Lebanon War, which could have included transferring kidnapped Israeli…
The following is a controversal summary of Iran’s PressTV interview with Lebanses leader Walid Jumblatt. Jumblatt published a communique accusing the Iranian TV station of deforming…
By its nature, war is a formative event. Often when war begins, various processes come to an end and are replaced by new ones. The Second…
What is left of Lebanon’s confessional democratic system as the country pursues its cold civil war? At no time in the recent past, even during the…
While the world obsesses this week over whether the ill-fated Annapolis conference will result in the ultimate Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, the real political drama is taking…
Wednesday afternoon, Saad al-Hariri’s Mostaqbal party agreed to a constitutional amendment that would allow Lebanese Armed Forces Commander Michel Suleiman to be elected president. Up until…
In late 1994, I interviewed Michel Aoun at his borrowed residence at La Haute-Maison just outside Paris. At the end of our conversation I asked the…
Those of us who welcomed the naming of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister of France are wearing a hair shirt in penance. We deserve no better…
** FREEDOM OF SPEECH: ‘ALL THE OTHER ARAB COUNTRIES ARE DICTATORSHIPS’ Facebook ban marks latest in series of restrictions that have driven dissidents to Lebanon BEIRUT…
The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated four individuals affiliated with the Syrian regime’s efforts to reassert Syrian control over the Lebanese political system. “Syria…
The two-month period to elect a new president has begun, and not surprisingly it started with a deal. On Tuesday, Parliament was called into session to…
Recently, amid reports that Hizbullah was creating closed-off security zones north of the Litani River and establishing a system of telephone lines parallel to that of…
Lebanese and Syrian activists organized a press conference yesterday in Beirut to evoke the cases of few thousand lebanese still “missing” in Syrian jails. Meanwhile, HRW…
Half of politics is being there; the other half is knowing what to do once you are there. Many of the better-known figures of the Future…
On Monday, the dean of Lebanese journalists, Ghassan Tueni, wrote a column in Al-Nahar that turns much else written on the same subject into annotation. The…
So, Michel Aoun’s candidate won. If the general knew any better, he would realize that Camille Khoury’s victory doomed any chance he had of becoming president…
All the signs are that the voting will go ahead in the Metn by-election this coming Sunday. However, partisans of both Michel Aoun and Amin Gemayel…
Michel Aoun has taken a risk in deciding to contest the Metn by-election against the former president, Amine Gemayel. Mediation may yet succeed in averting a…
A land grab proportionally equivalent to a foreign power occupying Arizona. Tuesday, July 24, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT As of this minute, Syria occupies at least…
It appears that the Israeli dilemma of whether Hezbollah emerged from the Second Lebanon War strengthened or weakened has been resolved by France. This weekend, Hezbollah…
It says something that one year after the summer 2006 war, we’re not sure whether to celebrate Hizbullah’s “divine victory” or bemoan Israel’s destruction of our…
BEIRUT, Lebanon, July 6 — Minutes before Islamic militants and government troops began killing each other in northern Lebanon six weeks ago, a flurry of cellphone…
For those following events in South Lebanon, the deadly attack on Sunday against soldiers of the Spanish contingent of UNIFIL was expected. Among the United Nations…
Many Lebanese, particularly in the majority camp, have been preoccupied with the court being set up to try suspects in the assassination of the late Rafik…
A friend of mine, a Lebanese journalist, tells the following story: Three years ago, when his country was under Syrian control, he was stopped at a…
Yesterday’s car bombing in Beirut, which killed Future Party parliamentarian Walid Eido, underscores the Syrian-backed multifront campaign to undermine stability in Lebanon. One front is the…
Negotiations to create a new national-unity government have hit a brick wall, and that’s a relief. The opposition’s conditions for agreeing to re-enter the government were…
It is a coincidence, but a useful one, that on the 40th anniversary of an Arab-Israeli war that prompted the Palestinian national movement to break free…
TRIPOLI, Lebanon, June 4 — A few miles from Mona Abboud’s bookstore in Tripoli, passengers in cars ducked below the dashboard as volleys of gunfire resounded…
Last week, while being driven through Chicago, I heard one Flynt Leverett speaking in a news report aired on National Public Radio. Leverett, a former National…
There are few pleasures these days as Lebanon descends into the kind of violence that Syria seems to manufacture so effortlessly. However, one of them is…
– Pierre Akel
Daily Star staff It’s never easy to discern movement in the midst of glacial stalemate, but the ice has definitely budged in the past 10 days…
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech on Sunday formalized Hizbullah’s divorce from the rest of Lebanese society, confirming there is a fundamental rift between the party and a…
We can thank the US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for having informed Syrian President Bashar Assad, from Beirut, that “the road to solving Lebanon’s…
The Daily Star Two Tuesdays ago, Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt spent 35 minutes with the president of the United States. In many ways, the…
Add Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht to the list of dignitaries who have left Damascus biting their fists in frustration. After meeting with his Syrian…
SPIEGEL ONLINE World Press Photo Mix-Up The World Press Photo of the Year 2006 shows upscale young Lebanese men and women visiting a bombed-out Beirut neighborhood…
Pierre Akel While Lebanon’s ongoing crisis has enjoyed prominent media coverage all over the world, no one seemed to notice that Hizbullah, which received up to…
Earlier this week, two statements neatly summarized the crisis in Lebanon. The first came from the EU’s representative in Beirut, Patrick Laurent; the second from Syria’s…
On the second anniversary of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the United States reaffirms its support for a free and democratic Lebanon that…